Bee Colony Collapse
Food Chain Radio Show #1042
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Bee Colony Collapse
Guests: Dr. Jonathan Lundgren of the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service Lab in Brookings, South Dakota & USDA?
Everybody knows the bees responsible for one-third of our food are disappearing and everybody, it seems, has a reason or two or three as to why.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio: Bee Colony Collapse – Why is USDA discouraging its scientific research into bee colony collapse?
But really, why are bees disappearing?
Dr. Jonathan Lundgren has been researching the disappearing bees for 11 years at the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service Lab in Brookings, South Dakota. His peer-reviewed research on neonicotinoid (or “neonic”) pesticides and their impact on pollinators has been widely published and has received accolades from his scientific contemporaries.
However, the USDA is apparently not happy with Dr. Lundgren’s work, and according to an official complaint filed by Dr. Lundgren, has been doing what it can, as an institution, to slow and stall the neonic research.
Dr. Lundgren is not the only neonic researcher to be so challenged by the USDA. Just the latest one. In July 2014, Dr. Jeffrey Pettis, formerly USDA’s lead bee scientist at the bee research lab in Beltsville, Maryland, was demoted from his position by USDA.
And this past spring, ten USDA scientists filed a petition for USDA to stop ordering researchers to “retract studies, water down findings, remove their name from authorship and endure long indefinite delays in approving publication of papers that may be controversial.”
This effort to stifle research into the disappearance of bees leads us to ask…
Leave a comment below: Why is USDA discouraging its scientific research into bee colony collapse?
Tune in here, for the syndicated Food Chain Radio Show #1042 January 30, 2016 Saturday 9AM Pacific
